When getting “generally favorable” reviews is the best scenario a female actor-turned-director faces, the conversation must shift to the watcher, not the maker.

Jodie Foster releases her Money Monster to North American cinemas tomorrow, following a Cannes debut Thursday that went over as well as it could have for an actress forced into the realm of unfair expectations. Though reports indicate a 10-minute standing ovation for Foster and the film’s cast, Money Monster’s critical reviews suggest the filmmaker’s creative output is still wedged between two industries almost entirely dominated by men: Foster is a female director who worked within the testosterone-addled bowels of Hollywood to craft a studio thriller, now turning her work over to the critics, most of whom are the same men who viciously tore Angelina Jolie to shreds for daring to think she had the right to tell a man’s story with her 2014 war drama Unbroken.

Of course IndieWire’s Eric Kohn likens the film to a classic directed by a man, writing that “Money Monster wants to be Network for the Occupy Wall Street age,” still clinging to the age-old criticism of female directors: that they’re just trying to catch up to the boys. That’s not to say Kohn’s review isn’t fair; it’s a well-written, genuine piece of criticism that makes keen observations about the way Foster handles her material. He writes: “Foster concludes with a shrug, as Clooney and Roberts grin at each other while a nearby television delivers the hard truths. Among the several pundits glimpsed in the movie’s closing moments, the one who stands out is Robert Reich, the valiant defender of the working class at the center of the 213 documentary “Inequality for All.” That movie, which finds Reich assailing income inequality by targeting Wall Street’s debilitating impact on wealth disparity, does a cleaner job of making its case. Money Monster doesn’t build on that focus so much as it turns up the volume on the same whiny song.”

A.O. Scott’s review for The New York Times pegs the film as a modern parable, but perhaps one that’s too superficial to warrant grand adulation: “But this is not really a movie intended to stir up populist anger. It assumes — correctly in this election year — that the anger is out there already and that nobody really needs to be told not to trust Wall Street or cable television. Unlike, say, The Big Short, Money Monster is not offering explanation or catharsis. Instead, it supplies a curious sort of comfort. (And also some pretty good laughs along the way.) Corporate bigwigs may be robbing us blind and celebrity pseudo-journalists may be lying to our faces, but as long as there are some old-school movie stars left in the world we can feel a little better about the state of things.” Stephanie Zacharek’s superb review in TIME is perhaps the most flattering of the crop: “As citizens, voters and moviegoers, Americans right now are a fractured group, a squabbling bunch of blind men each shaking a fist at a different part of the elephant. Movies, particularly big-budget mainstream ones, aren’t nimble enough to keep up with quicksilver shifts in the national mood: The pictures we’re seeing today may have been germinating for months, if not years. That’s why it’s a small miracle that Jodie Foster’s superb thriller Money Monster is hitting theaters right now: It’s the movie of the moment, an expertly made, state-of-the-nation entertainment that also underscores just how little most of us know about the behind-the-scenes shell game the banking and finance industries are orchestrating, using our money as the disappearing nugget. If you could pour the nation’s collective financial anxiety into one vessel, it would take the shape of Money Monster.” and “If Money Monster is basically a piece of entertainment, it’s also a discomfiting one… its edges are serrated, sharp enough to cut. Foster and screenwriters Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf navigate the movie’s tone shifts with ease, knowing how to suddenly make us feel something for characters we might have found repellent just minutes earlier. Foster has good actors to work with, too: Clooney is almost too adept at flashing that snow-job showbiz smile. But he can also change course seamlessly, making us believe Lee as a man who finds, to his own great surprise, that he has a tiny sliver of a conscience after all. Roberts doesn’t get much screentime, but we hear her voice, a lot, through Lee’s earphone: When Kyle first takes charge, pacing and sputtering like a zoo tiger ready to burst out of his skin, Patty is Lee’s lifeline. “Just keep breathing,” she tells him, her voice cottony and soothing. She may as well be talking us down from our tree, too.”

The A.V. Club’s Jesse Hassenger, however, wrote a brutal review that attacked not only the film’s direction, but its qualifications to handle the topics it presents: “To be sure, this is a chilling dystopia, where screenwriters with seemingly little knowledge of this country’s financial systems are allowed to pontificate about where it all went wrong… Foster, a novice at suspenseful filmmaking, doesn’t seem to know which screws to tighten or if screws even need tightening at all. Why bother to ratchet up suspense over Kyle’s desperation when you have cutting-edge satire of callow financial gurus and the insidious phenomenon of flashy cable television? For example, Lee’s Money Monster show is so irreverent, it uses clips from old movies to punctuate his announcements. Similarly, Foster’s Money Monster movie is so tapped into the zeitgeist that it includes shots that zoom into digital guts and wires, revealing the galvanizing truth that our money is really just ones and zeroes on today’s information superhighway.” and “With its cultural and satirical details firmly rooted in the previous century, Money Monster might have been better served by going fully (rather than accidentally) retro. It certainly cries out for the kind of crack character-actor supporting cast that might have enlivened the ’90s version of this script, but it throws so much of its weight behind Clooney and Roberts that the side characters can’t provide much color. That includes O’Connell, spitting out a working-class-schnook accent and constantly baring his teeth like a wild animal. Foster grants him license to rant and rave while also making sure the other characters develop sympathy for him with an alarming, almost confusing speed. (It’s rare for hostages to be preloaded with Stockholm syndrome)… There’s not much pleasure in taunting Money Monster as a ham-fisted, tin-eared, anticlimactic, and lethargically shot parable about greed and the 99 percent. Clooney and Foster gravitate toward smart projects, and it’s possible that Roberts could better play a TV producer in a movie that requires more than her just nodding ruefully at her own hard-bitten wisdom. The movie’s self-confidence actually becomes discomfiting, if also a little bit fascinating. This is no economics lesson, at least not as intended. It’s a testament to the peculiar fragility of movie-star tastes—and the accompanying moral high ground. There’s not much honor in a movie that rants about the little guy getting screwed then hands out its stars’ chumminess as a damp consolation prize.”

Tasha Robinson sums it up quite nicely, though:

Surprised at the widespread dismissal I’m seeing over Jodie Foster’s MONEY MONSTER. It’s much smarter than people are giving it credit for. — Tasha Robinson (@TashaRobinson) May 12, 2016

So, what to make of it all? As Foster herself has said in the past, there’s not a “conspiracy” (at least one with a paper trail) against women in the film industry, but it’s curious that a film can receive such poignant praise from someone like Zacharek, but criticism that feels like it was written after watching an entirely different film. At the end of the day, Money Monster is a studio production placing its glimmering stars’ bodies on display along the Croisette, one of the grandest cinema-based stages in the world; criticism is welcome, expected, and typical for any filmmaker, but the difficult burden of inequality has made it nearly impossible not to treat the somewhat polarized reception of a film like Money Monster‘s with a cautious eye as we attempt to keep in check a system that often gives women — especially actresses in the director’s chair — the short shrift.

The last word on her status as a female filmmaker in an industry dominated by men, however, should be left up to the filmmaker herself. “I think studio executives are scared, period,” Foster said at a Cannes press conference, as reported by The Guardian. “I think this is the most risk-averse period in movie history. Now so many things have changed in terms of the economy, the structure of studios.” She added: “Every film is a new invention… We’re not a factory where we make shoes and we keep making shoes. So the rules are going to be different. The conversation has to become as complex as possible to really attend to the issues… I think men are often confused by women who don’t follow traditional rules in conflict… But guess what: all they need to do is have more experiences with them. I don’t think it’s a big plot of men putting women down in the film business – the film industry is pretty progressive. They’re just stuck with the same traditional models and they’re trying to figure out how to get around that. But they haven’t had enough experiences with women to do that.”

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Once, when he was three, Joey Nolfi fancied himself as an exotic type and boldly told someone that he was “from North America.” He’s taken that status as self-appointed ambassador of the North American people and built with it a budding career in entertainment journalism. In other words: he’s written about awards season, film, pop culture, and the arts for a variety of publications including Entertainment Weekly, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, AFROPUNK, East End Fashion Magazine, and Naima Mora Online. He also acts, makes films, moonlights as a DJ/general nightlife legend, and can’t wait for the day that his friends have children that he can to take to the zoo one time and then spend the rest of his life patting himself on the back for it.

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Editor-in-Chief Joey Nolfi sifted through 87 years of Best Picture winners to come up with a formula that gauges Oscar traction. He ranked the films heading into this year's race, so you should check it out.

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RT @joeynolfi: AND ALSO Happy Presidents’ Day to President Natalie Portman at the end of Mars Attacks https://t.co/NrJGzYnAYh